I live in the rainforest. There is zero grass here except in the places that have been disturbed by humans.

Yeah, because fuck biodiversity.

Have you ever seen how grass grows? It is the exact opposite of biodiversity. Even the grazing herbivores who usually eat grass stand to benefit from the eradication of grass and its replacement with a more diverse assortment of vegetation. Even the animal exploitation industry’s own publications explain the nutritional benefits of leguminous and other non-grass “forage” and attempt to calculate the amount of grass that can be included in the animals’ diets (in order to save money) without compromising weight gain. I have personally seen cows and goats go out of their way, crossing several hectares of pasture, to consume whatever non-grass vegetation they could find (often baby fruit trees) rather than eat the grass available to them.

So yes, let’s kill all the “native” grass and plant a diverse array of trees, shrubs, palms, forbs, vines, and herbaceous ground-covers. Everyone in the world would benefit except perhaps the ruling class and a few other parasites.

Or has been so extensively selected by humans (intentionally or unintentionally) that it no longer resembles the original wild form. Either way, the world would be a more pleasant place without grass.

the facts about animal agriculture and climate change

some of the accounting behind it

a book that summarises the issue

Exploiting and killing other beings is NOT solarpunk.

A solarpunk culture would strive to dissolve every form of social hierarchy and domination – whether based on class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, or species – dispersing the power some individuals or groups wield over others and thus increasing the aggregate freedom of all; empowering the disempowered and including the excluded. It is rooted in the legacy of such liberatory movements as anti-authoritarian socialism, feminism, racial justice, queer and trans liberation, disability struggles, animal liberation, and digital freedom projects.

I hate the feeling of grass touching me. I’m reluctant to even rip it out by hand, as that would require touching it. I get at the roots with the machete and dislodge it that way so that I only need to touch it briefly in order to fling it onto the neighbour’s land. Even then, I feel like I need to scrub myself afterwards.

Allegedly. We can’t know that for sure, and honestly, I have serious doubts.

Fuck grass. Anything grass can do, other plants can do better. Except maybe c4 photosynthesis, but that hasn’t been necessary so far.

…

…This comment is far too real. This should be some dystopian horror story, not what’s actually happening all around me. I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever been curled up in bed at night listening to the chainsaws destroying the forest on all sides, or awoken to the smell of smoke and wondered if today would be the end, or watched a faerie die and not been able to do anything, but it SUCKS. If people don’t change their ways and put a stop to deforestation very soon, there may not be any enchanted forests left. And a world without faeries would not be a pleasant place.

Industrial agriculture has gotten pretty efficient at deforestation, but for food production, growing your own makes much more sense.

I don’t doubt that the return on investment for solar and wind will continue to improve relative to fossil fuels when used for electricity generation, but the problem seems to be, again, the manufacture of infrastructure such as wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and so on, which require energy-intensive mining and refining of minerals. Unless every stage of the manufacturing process can be electrified, the efficiency of generating electricity using wind and solar won’t matter in the slightest, as there will be no way to use that electricity to eventually recycle/replace the existing wind/solar infrastructure, let alone to deploy more of it or to do either of these while maintaining the high energy return on energy invested.

To be clear, I don’t want solar/wind/etc to be dependent on fossil fuels at all, and so I would be interested to read an explanation of how these (or other) clean energy technologies can be deployed without using fossil fuels at any stage of the process. The problem presented in the article seems to be that such technologies currently do depend upon the use of coal, and I posted the article here with the idea that it might get people to start thinking about potential solutions to this problem, not to suggest that the deployment of clean energy technologies is not worthwhile.

Realistically, even if photovoltaic panels and wind turbines can be recycled 100% efficiently, the supply of energy from these sources at any given time will still have an upper limit based on the finite supply of the minerals required for these technologies, so people cannot continue to increase their energy consumption indefinitely even from “renewable” sources. But that’s a separate problem.

Do you know of a way to efficiently produce the infrastructure needed for solar, wind, etc using energy from solar, wind, etc such that the energy return on energy (ERoE) is high enough? That seemed like the crux of the argument made in the article, and I’d be interested to read a rebuttal.

It would seem that scaling back the use of many modern technologies is both necessary and inevitable. When hydrocarbon-based energy sources run out, it’s back to old-fashioned carbohydrates…

Can you define “non exploitation”?

I probably could, but I cannot say what Donald Watson or Leslie Cross or anyone else meant.

My understanding is that leather is a waste byproduct of the meat industry

It is a co-product, and it directly supports the industry.

so much in the same way that gas is from dinosaurs that are already dead, the cows that provide leather are “already dead” due to their use as meat.

Dinosaurs did not die as a result of humans exploiting them in order to consume their bodies. Cows live and die solely for the sake of exploitation.

It is not possible to exploit today someone who died millions of years ago.

As for what humans do to each other, I’m not the one to ask. I don’t think that “animals” in the original definition of veganism was intended to include humans, but I don’t know that for sure. I doubt that the linked article considers exploitation of humans in determining which cars to feature.

Shit. I use uBlock Origin and block all javascript by default, so I didn’t even see that. I’ll add a warning to the post.

I’d say so, at least in theory. Veganism is about non-exploitation, not ecological impact. That said, there are plenty of other reasons to avoid gasoline.

Wait, what? What did I miss?

While that sounds like an interesting project, I’m not trying to invest a lot of time and effort into this. The grass won’t stop growing back while I figure it out.

Do you know if there is already a theme like darkly for Piefed?